GUITAR TIP: Tremolo (Part II)

everyone welcome back for part two our discussion on the sort of magical classical guitar technique called tremolo to really benefit from today's episode I'd strongly suggest that you spend a good deal of time working on the exercises I taught you in part one so watch that if you haven't already and for the rest of you here is tremolo part two [Music] today I'd like to help you bring your tremolo to the next level to do that I'm going to show you two more exercises that's going to work out any remaining kinks in your tremolo technique and then we'll finish the episode by talking about how to add musicality to your tremolo [Music] very often I'll hear guitarists who have certainly put in their fair share of hours working on tremolo however when they try to play fast they end up producing a sort of lopsided sound that has an almost galloping effect rather than what we want which is a sort of ethereal evenness it's almost as if there's an instrument in the other room sustaining that's the goal so to fix this unevenness we can practice swinging the rhythm back and forth so for example we can start by going P am I so it's long-short long-short long-short long-short we can also practice short long short long short long like this you etc this exercise is great for exposing the micro imperfections that can occur between our rapid finger movements most guitarists have had the experience that once they get good at tremolo on the first string they're required to play it on the second string and that can be difficult to get rid of this let's learn about the concepts of flexion and extension so flexion is this motion here just the fingers closing toward the palm and in fact we can remember what Fernandez or says about plucking plucking is simply closing the hand one finger at a time so that means that we go from our point of rest which is this natural curled shape of the finger and we close the hand one finger at a time and after that finger plucks it can then just let go and it naturally springs back to its point of rest which is kind of cool actually you can hold your finger down to it palm let go and it springs back to where it was so every pluck starts by touching the string plucking letting the finger release so it springs back to its point of rest hovering over the string ready to bluff again [Music] now the common mistake with tremolo is people accidentally do this this is called extension and we don't want to extend the fingers past their point of rest we want to let the fingers flex towards the palm release return to the point of rest but some good hearts accidentally extend the finger past the string there by hitting the first string makes for a messy tremolo to practice playing on the inside strings let's just do PA mi on every single string like this all the way down back up now the rest of this video is going to be about musicality which involves some serious multitasking so if you are struggling at all with the technical portion of tremolo don't be afraid to spend a few weeks maybe practicing 10 minutes a day with these exercises and come back this video will be here when you're ready [Music] most tremolo pieces are in two parts there's an accompaniment and a melody the melody is usually the singable part and the accompaniment just provides harmonic supports in required us for example the melody is the upper part the tremolo a bit and then the thumb provides the accompaniment by arpeggiating chords and just like as if we were in an orchestra when there are several different musicians we have to control the balance between the different parts and since we have two different voices here this is no different so we as guitarists have to be able to control the volume disparity between those two parts and the way you can do that is by controlling the height of the wrist if we bring the wrist higher it's going to bring the bass line the accompaniment out if you bring it lower it'll make it softer and the melody will appear to be louder so here we have the accompaniment starting with a low wrist and I'm going to raise the rest height cutlery it's more resonant to and if I bring the wrist back down they got quieter I'm not changing the force of the thumb I'm just changing the height of the wrist and the reason this works is because as I raise my wrist higher I'm putting more arm weight into the string which makes the note sound louder and more resonant so now when I'm playing the piece if I want to bring out the melody I can lower the wrist which turns the volume down there and that'll make the melody appear as louder if I just take the first chord this is the first chord of the major section I can gradually lower the rest and now you hear that melody as being much louder raise the wrist [Music] now although in most music the melody is louder than the accompaniment when something interesting happens in the accompaniment you can bring out that sound like at the end of a queer dose you get this interesting little bass line which is nice and melodic and at the same moment the melody is just droning on a c-sharp so that's a good moment to bring out the accompaniment by raising the wrist height so here's that whole phrase it starts with the melody louder [Music] dynamics are an essential part of any musical performance and is no different with tremolo [Music] so to learn how to crescendo and decrescendo while performing tremolo let's just take the opening chord of Ricardo's and we're gonna start very very soft almost inaudible and gradually gradually is the key word we're going to swell to our loudest volume and when we think we've found it we're going to come back to being almost inaudible again gradual is the key word around there is the peak so I'll head back word until I fade away to nothing so find moments in the piece to amplify the intensity of the moment with a crescendo and likewise find moments where the sound is coming to arrest and let that riddle II settle in with a nice day crescendo this is the final and perhaps most delicate part of any really good tremolo Roboto is when we stretch time we can speed up or slow down to highlight the beauty of a moment and create some Evan flow in the rhythm let me show you how this works here's a phrase with no Roboto and very clean sounds beautiful because the music is beautiful I even did a little bit of a crescendo there so I had some dynamics but if I was to stretch the time at the most intense moment the peak of the phrase then we can create something a little bit more interesting [Music] so I stretched the time to make that beautiful moment the highest note even more beautiful by just allowing it a little bit more time now this is a highly subjective part of musical interpretation some might think I'm using way too much bravado and some might think I'm using too little but that's okay because this is sort of the chocolate and vanilla stage of music making you get to decide how much spice you want in your food and how much Roboto you like in your music so I'd encourage you to find moments in the piece which by stretching the time a little bit can intensify the beauty of the moment okay so there we have it we learned how to train our fingers using specific exercises from part one and a little bit from today as well if you practice these regularly you will give yourself the technical foundation for a beautiful elegant and even tremolo now once you've achieved that technical stability you need to then actually transcend those technical aspects of playing and enter the wonderful realm of musicality and that means using expressive tools like voice balancing dynamics and Roboto how you mix those musical ingredients together is up to you and your own aesthetic preferences and in fact one of the reasons we love to listen to dozens of different guitarists play the same piece is because each of us are capable of creating our own new lovable interpretation of a piece so it's time for you to start making your own thanks so much for watching I really hope you found this to be useful if you haven't already please do subscribe and if you want to help me make more videos like this you can check out my my patreon lastly at the time of this video we are all under quarantine and are being asked in certain places to mandatorily wear masks so if you would like a music themed mask my lovely wife who goes by the artistic name of we're iam is a wonderful designer and illustrator and has come up with some great music themed masks that you can check out in the description below see you next time you

Channel: Brandon Acker

Views: 380,688

Keywords: tremolo, brandon acker, classical guitar, recuerdos, guitar, tutorial, lesson, music lesson, guitar tip, segovia, bream, ana vidovic, fabio lima, electric guitar, barre chords, guitar chords

Id: 9WC6-qStkjw

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020